1 out of 5

Directed by: Michael Bay

Well, you done did it, Mr. Bay: you made a movie I consider nearly unwatchable.

Of course, a negative criticism of a Michael Bay film, and the Transformers films under his purview, is, in general, far from being a hot take. And I’m not necessarily here to just add to that bashing: I swear I have approached these films with a low bar of simply expecting them to be nonsense spectacle. I know I have Bay bias, but whenever a series makes it to as many entries as this one, well, I get curious and allow that there’s some draw, even if it’s a basic one. Still, I know the dude’s m.o., have read plenty of the bad reviews, and used that to go in with as much of my pre-judgements turned off as possible. And that’s what’s really astonishing about this curiously named third entry: it’s bland. The editing, the look, the characters: all have been shaped in some half-step response to Transformer 2’s failings, leading to a more “mature” Bay flick that also can’t escape being a Bay flick.

The second movie was disappointing, but at least in sequely ways that made sense – on a surface level, trying to go bigger and louder and doing too many callbacks, and then beneath that surface, the production woes – whereas Dark just… exists. It’s practically a retread of 2, storywise, with another “whoops we forgot about this massive thing from our past” MacGuffin that the Decepticons (evil robots, for those new to this) and the Autobots (good robots) both want, and the ‘bots human proxy, Sam (Shia LeBeouf) gets the hot tip about Decepticon shenanigans that his special ops government pals won’t listen to until it’s too late.

Zooming out, I think Ehren Kruger’s script does grasp that these movies can work as big budget cartoons – at least, that’s the way I interpret the overwrought villain dialogue – but that clashes with the attempt to make this entry more “serious,” with Bay avoiding a lot of his swirly camera moves, trying to give LeBeouf some room for some real weighty pathos regarding his new girlfriend he just met, cinematography that’s been toned down to bright and shiny blockbuster versus 1 and 2’s more identifiable Baysian blown out coloring and grain, and the editing employing some truly odd transitory cuts that are either suggestive of someone in the editing booth imagining this as an indie flick, or, somewhat more likely, the team realizing that 2.5 hrs is a lot of runtime, so might as well get rid of pesky story beats so we can have more slo-mo robots.

Regarding which: the blending of “let’s make this more mature than the previous movie” with “but also the previous movie made a lotta billions” leads to visual tedium with the spectacle. The robo design has evolved to either be too humanized to register “realistically” as bots or too obscure to find a face; the action scenes now employ slo-mo in a video game fashion – where you might pause for a button input – instead of cinematically, leading to really puzzlingly pointless spotty applications of the thing, which also extends to a general weightlessness to what should be very impactful concepts: a long escape through a crumbling building; a giant centipede-esque bot. Part of this may be the ante up of tech advancements which provided more opportunities to combine CG characters and humans with less obvious blocking / compositing, but it’s far from seamless at this point, and becomes an overused shtick pretty quickly. All of this to say that the film visually feels shallow and uncommitted; there’s a lot happening and yet it’s never exciting.

Tearing apart the story is a little silly if you take the aforementioned live-action cartoon into account, but the mish-mash tone does highlight the ongoing structural issues: the humans have no role here, and are essentially just running around and watching the robots; there’s not much rhyme or reason to why ‘bots are better off in their automobile forms, and transform in and out randomly at the “coolest” moments; there’s no permadeath for ‘bots, and thus no stakes; Optimus Prime loses every fight he’s in, making him a laughable leader – though maybe this is a cartoon callback, dunno.

At the very least, our in-it-for-the-laughs celebrity guest stars are having fun, and if John Malkovich was completely wasted, the returning John Turturro has wholly embraced the nonsense, and Frances McDormand actually gets to be competently badass.

This is my limit to how many words I can eke out about this flick.